Trading Gold for Salt

If you could choose
between a pile of salt and a pile of gold, you would probably choose the
gold. After all, you know that you can always buy a container of salt for
about forty-five cents at the local supermarket. But what if you could not
easily get salt, and without it you could not survive? In fact, throughout
history salt has been very difficult to obtain in many parts of the world,
and people feared a lack of salt the way we in the industrialized world
fear a shortage of fuel oil.

Once cultures began relying on grain, vegetable, or boiled meat diets
instead of mainly hunting and eating roasted meat, adding salt to food became
an absolute necessity for maintaining life. Because the Akan lived in the
forests of West Africa, they had few natural resources for salt and always
needed to trade for it. Gold, however, was much easier to come by. Every
Akan knew how to find tiny grains of gold sparkling in the river beds after
a rainfall. The people who lived in the desert of North Africa could easily
mine salt, but not gold. They craved the precious metal that would add so
much to their personal splendor and prestige. These mutual needs led to
the establishment of long-distance trade routes that connected very different
cultures.

Camel caravans from North Africa carried bars of salt as well as cloth,
tobacco, and metal tools across the Sahara to trading centers like Djenne
and Timbuktu on the Niger River. Some items for which the salt was traded
include gold, ivory, slaves, skins, kola nuts, pepper, and sugar.